The invention relates to a method for triggering a cost entry in the context of a job, which is issued by a management information system, and executed on an execution system, wherein the execution system transmits job related status reports in Job Definition Format to the management information system, and wherein incoming status reports are stored in the management information system.
The Job Definition Format “JDF” (and the Job Messaging Format “JMF”, as a subset of JDF) are generally known data formats, which have been developed and are being maintained by the consortium “International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress” (“CIP4-Consortium”, www.cip4.org). The development of JDF is based on the objective to standardize the communication between print shop, designer, advertising agency, customer for printed matters, and sub vendors of contractors in the context of a networked graphic production for all production options and eventualities in a flexible manner and without restrictions.
JDF is based on the extensible markup language “XML”, a meta language, which is also generally known and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”, www.w3.org) for defining document types and, according to the intentions of the CIP4-Consortium, and is to serve as a standard data format for describing processes and products, not only in all production areas of a networked print shop, in particular in sales, job costing, and order processing, production planning and control in the regular production, in preproduction, print, print post processing, and shipping, in the cross sectional areas, materials and warehouse management, financial and payroll accounting, controlling, cost accounting, and quality assurance.
Through vertical integration of data, on the one hand of the production process, and on the other hand of the accounting sectors, JDF shall facilitate a standardized documentation of the relevant target and actual data, and seamless production control. In particular, a JDF job shall only be described once in one form, which all process participants understand, also in external communications with customers and subcontractors and their execution systems in the man-machine and machine-machine communication over all language and platform boundaries.
According to the philosophy of the CIP4-Consortium, and the concept of JDF based thereupon, status information with respect to the processes performed in the context of a job, is being stored in the “audit pool” structure of a JDF file, and collected and analyzed through post calculation after completing the job.
In generally known methods of the said kind, cost entries are triggered as soon as an operator indicates the completion of a process in the context of processing an order, through business data recording on notepads, or in a BDE terminal.
It is the object of the invention, to propose another method for cost entries after the completion of a single process.